Aspidistra lurida is the
type of the genus. It was illustrated in Edwards’ botanical register (Ker Gawler 1822) from a plant found at James Colvill’s nursery on the King’s Road, Chelsea (see link
below). A plant from the same source was featured later in Curtis’s botanical magazine (Sims 1824) (see link below). Nothing
reliable enough to be recorded was known of its date of introduction or origin but A. lurida is now known to be Chinese. The best that can be said about the date of
introduction of A. lurida is that it was before 1822.

J. D. Parks who collected in China for the
Horticultural Society in 1823/4 has been wrongly credited with A. lurida's introduction (e.g. Coats 1969, Chapman & Wang 2002). Parks did not introduce A. lurida but was responsible
for introducing the second Aspidistra, A. punctata.

In horticulture, the name A. lurida
became routinely applied to plants of A. elatior. It is not clear to me why this occurred, as the two have
never been synonymous in the botanical literature. J. G. Baker (1875) (see link below) reduced Aspidistra to a single species, A. lurida, by placing A. punctata under it but he
reduced A. elatior to a synonym of Plectogyne variegata not A. lurida.

In his Atlas des Plantes published in Paris in 1896 Daniel Bois provided an accurate illustration of A. elatior and labelled it as such. However, when the same
illustration was published in Edward Step’s Favourite Flowers (Step 1897) to which Bois contributed, the label was changed to A. lurida. This suggests that A.
lurida was the more familiar name in England.

OttoStapf (in Wright 1903-05) (see link below) reversed Baker's changes and re-established the three species again (and
added a fourth A. minutiflora). Nevertheless, the confusion in horticulture persisted and in
the first edition of the RHS Dictionary of Gardening (Chittenden 1951), A. elatior and A. punctata were given as synonyms of A. lurida. This was corrected in the Supplement (Synge
1969) which followed Stapf and accurately summarised the situation as regards A. lurida, A. punctata and A. elatior.

Whatever the reason, confusion between A. lurida and A. elatior remains common in horticulture although the flowers are quite distinct.

Aspidistra lurida had the advantage of primacy and its discovery at Colvill’s nursery was well advertised but it seems never
to have been commonly grown. In 1954 Stearn commented that it was no longer in cultivation; it may have resurfaced in the 1980’s (Rutherford 1990) although Rutherford's
comparison of the plants seems a little muddled. Aspidistra lurida remains an obscure plant and despite the recent appearance of the name in nursery lists
is difficult reliably to obtain. There is no suggestion that A. lurida is particularly difficult to grow but the dominance of A. elatior in cultivation must
presumably be due to its relative speed of growth as well as its larger size (elatior means "taller"). The confusion over names cannot have helped and one can imagine that specimens of "small" A.
lurida Ker Gawl. may have been discarded in favour of "large" A. lurida hort. i.e. A. elatior.